Into the archives...

Learning to Read:
Lu Ann Homza (center) discusses with her students intricate script handwriting on copies of 15th century Spanish manuscripts. Students in her fall independent study learn to decipher the old Spanish to prepare for a spring research venture to the archives of Pamplona, Spain. Students preparing for the 2013 include (from left) Jack Middough ’15, Jessie Dzura ’13, Crosby Enright ’14 and Tracey Johnson ’14.

...but first, let’s get comfortable with 400-year-old Spanish

by Justine Whelan '14
| November 28, 2012

The writing is cramped, and ink bleeds
through the 400-year-old manuscript. There are letters missing or substituted,
strange abbreviations and various words that seem to make no sense.

And the writing is all in
Spanish—not relatively straightforward modern Spanish, but the archaic version
of the tongue from several centuries ago.

William & Mary historian Lu Ann Homza runs
a year-long, two-pronged program designed to develop and hone the skills
necessary for students to read the handwritten documents in Spanish archives
and come out with compelling and important nuggets of history. Students spend
their fall semester learning to read Spanish documents from the 16th to the
17th centuries. They are preparing for a spring-semester trip to the archives
of Pamplona, Spain, where they will read, transcribe and contextualize original
documents that pertain to their research.

Specific
skill/profound outcome

Homza, a professor of history at William and Mary,
specializes in Spanish and Italian history between 1400 and 1700 AD. She has
made the trip to Pamplona many times for her own research. It was during a trip
in 2008 that she woke up one morning with the realization that she should bring
her students her students, because working in Spanish state archives with early
modern manuscripts would be a unique experience for undergraduates in the
United States.

“It’s a very specific skill that
leads to a profound outcome,” says Homza of the study and subsequent travel
experience. “First, the independent study that the students take with me
teaches them how to read the handwritten texts. Then, once they are in the
Pamplona archives, they have to find a manuscript that’s manageable in length
and decipherable, and turn that source toward larger historical ends.”

The archives can
drive you crazy

The process can be trying and
frustrating—as any research can be—but not being able to read your material
would drive any seasoned historian to the brink of insanity. The fall training session
is designed to keep the novice historians on the right side of sane once they
enter the archives of Pamplona in the spring.

Jessie Dzura ’13, Crosby Enright
’14 and Tracey Johnson ’14 have been spending their fall Monday mornings with
Homza working through the sample documents as a team. By only their second
meeting, the work had already become far less jarring at first glance. Jack
Middough ’15 and Sagra Alvarado ’15 will have to hit the ground running; they
joined the team in mid November. Homza is preparing them for the intensity of
the archival experience—reading well and reading fast are necessary skills.

“We start with what we call transcriptions—not
translations—of 16th century texts,” says Homza. She explained that
a transcription is the typed version of an original manuscript that another
historian has written down and edited. Working with transcriptions allows the
students to familiarize themselves with the language of the time period,
without the added pressure of trying to read the intricate script handwriting.

Students establish a basic
vocabulary of early modern words and abbreviations that often cannot be found
in a dictionary today. Homza’s groups focus on documents from court cases,
often ecclesiastical trials. Undergraduate research on trips to Pamplona has
encompassed a broad range of court cases that center on disputes among church
officials. Homza explains that the 16th and 17th
centuries saw a great deal of clerical misbehavior. Students have investigated
allegations of some priests’ penchant
for illicit dancing and others that center on their nasty tobacco habits.

Priestly misbehaviors
and witchcraft

Homza recalls a humorous case in
which a collection of priests entirely shirked their ecclesiastical responsibilities
in favor of clock making; they were subsequently disciplined through the
bishop’s courts. The more serious end of the spectrum includes criminal charges
of witchcraft, specifically the corruption of children, infanticide and what we
now understand as attempted murder. In 2010, Hanna Langstein came across the
phrase “medio homicidio,” which
translates literally as “half homicide.” Stumped by the archaic terminology,
she began to look to others to help her understand what these words really
meant.

Homza recalls how unfamiliar that
medio homicidio expression had been
to her and Langstein; it even stumped their colleagues in Spain. Langstein went
through records of two years of trials which, with the help of one unique
specialist in medieval studies, led her to the realization that medio homicidio meant intent to murder.
Langstein’s discovery was truly a kind of revelation, as none of the historians
Homza had reached out to bad been at all familiar with the phrase.

Historical detective work, such
as chasing down the meaning of medio
homicidio, is all in a day’s work in the archives.Fortunately for Homza’s students, some of the way has already been
smoothed. The bishops’ secretaries were
charged with recording the trials and created a shorthand of their own.

“They were notaries, and they did this for a
living,” says Homza, going on to explain that some of the abbreviations are
very difficult to figure out without guidance. For instance, these scribes can
write something like “BER” and the students have to realize that they mean to
use bachiller, the Spanish word for a
bachelor’s degree.

Transcriptions: Training
wheels for newbies

Homza points out that another
advantage of having the students begin with transcriptions is that the modern
historians making the transcripts used fully spelled-out words to replace the
shorthand used by the original scribes. By early October, Homza’s students have
advanced enough in their practice to read photocopies of the original
manuscripts , working through the content difficulties as well as the visual
obstacles that come with reading something that has been around for several
hundred years. They have to move quickly as well.

“Students have five days in the archives, and then we return the
following Saturday, so it’s kind of a blitzkrieg trip. It’s fast,” explains
Homza.

This
spring, Johnson says she wants to delve into the
many witchcraft trials of the time. Dzura intends to analyze gender relations
in the context of domestic abuse trials, and Enright says she will focus on
women of the church in the form of beatas, or laywomen servers.

Enright is no stranger to the
script or the pressures of the archival work, as she is preparing for her
second trip to the Spanish archives.

Homza extended an invitation to
Enright for the Pamplona trip of 2011, and Enright realized that the experience
would be the perfect preparation for her pursuit of a career in academics.

Historical surprises
in the archives

On her earlier trip, Enright
found a stirring trial of nuns attempting to reform their own convent in 1569,
which entailed throwing out their slack abbess. The nuns, young women of
Enright’s own age, were uniting together to stand up in the face of hierarchy
and tradition for what they believed was right. Enright found original
documents outlining the reforms the nuns were pursuing, and says she was
thrilled to see nuns had signed these documents.

“Illiteracy
is often conceived of as the norm during this period, especially in this
particular convent which was small and not wealthy or well-run!” explains
Enright of her exciting discovery. Her documents were written and signed by
these young nuns, which proved they were both educated and literate women of the
16th century.

Her research process did not have
a smooth start. Enright says she arrived in Pamplona only to find that she
couldn’t read sections of the trial she wanted to use. Out of frustration, she
turned to master archivist Don José Luis Sales Tirapu of the Diocesan Archive
for help.

“Honestly, I couldn’t have done
it if it weren’t for him,” she says of Don José Luis. “He taught me how to look at it, and to realize
that the word spacing can be really weird.”

Homza says that
Enright’s frustrations are typical of the research process. “Some days you’ll
be able to read everything, and other days you won’t be able to see a thing in
terms of how the lettering works,” she says. Challenges continue well into the
archival experience itself as well. Students need to have a second interest to
research because it may be that they can’t use the sources they would’ve liked.
Sources might be too difficult to read or even be missing from the archive.
Homza says professional historians face the same kinds of challenges all the
time.

Historian’s
nightmare: The dead end

Homza recalls a trip in which
five sources she desperately needed were missing from the collection, and
probably had literally been taken home by earlier archivists seventy years ago.
Those sorts of contingencies, she says, truly exemplify the nature of
historical research in a way she could never get across in a classroom. “Our
ability to write history depends on what documents you have, and whether or not
you can read them,” she says.

Enright confirms that invaluable
lesson and remembers watching Homza cope with her discoveries and obstacles
along the way. “I’m considering pursuing a career in academics, so it was
interesting to see her and how she worked and what she did to overcome the
difficulties.”

Homza clarifies that her students
are not embarking on a foreign exchange experience. Her students are taking
their first steps as historical researchers in their own right. These students
are afforded the opportunity to work with pieces of history unavailable to the
general public and to talk to the archivists who have dedicated their lives to
this work. Homza gives her students the chance to make history from the ground
up, to watch it change, and to learn why she calls history “a living, breathing
thing.”